Inside ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’

As its title suggests, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is a story of fractured identity, in which a young woman tries to negotiate incompatible versions of herself, all the while wondering who she really is. The film, Sean Durkin’s impressively self-assured debut feature, switches back and forth between two periods in its protagonist’s life — an indeterminate span when she is part of a cult in rural New York and the time just after her escape from the group, when she has found refuge with her older sister and brother-in-law in their rented lakeside vacation house.

The sister knows her as Martha, though she does not necessarily know her very well. The leader of the cult, who claims spiritual and physical intimacy with all his followers, has christened her Marcy May. (Marlene is the all-purpose pseudonym female cult members use when answering the telephone.)

Whatever her name, and whatever her mood — it ranges from vaguely unsettled to acutely anguished — Martha is played by Elizabeth Olsen, a very pretty actress whose on-camera presence is at once vivid and interestingly blurred. Her features seem to shift, appearing sharp from some angles and soft from others, and her body can look alternately sturdy and frail, depending on the circumstances.

Ms. Olsen’s performance is both the key to the film and the source of its sometimes frustrating opacity. Like Todd Haynes’s “Safe” (though with less ambition or intellectual rigor), “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is, in part, a psychological case study of someone whose inner life is permanently out of reach, if it even exists at all.

Martha’s background is left deliberately sketchy. We know that she and her sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), have some family unhappiness behind them, but we never learn precisely what happened between them, or to their parents. Nor do we know what drew Martha into the thrall of Patrick, the Svengali of an agrarian sex commune whose sun-dappled fields and lithe young bodies suggest a spiritually ambitious Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. But it is clear that her passivity and uncertainty make her perfect prey for Patrick and his group.

Everything is friendly and relaxed at first, with fatherly affection and an occasional rebuke from Patrick, who is played with sinewy, sinister charisma by John Hawkes. Gradually an uglier side of his community emerges, and it starts to look less like a progressive summer camp than a new incarnation of the Manson family. Female acolytes are initiated into the group by being drugged and raped by the leader, and the most disturbing scenes show Martha undergoing this ordeal and then, later, preparing a new recruit for it.

Photo

John Hawkes and Elizabeth Olsen in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” the debut feature by the director Sean Durkin.Credit
Jody Lee Lipes/20th Century Fox

But life with Lucy and her husband, Ted (Hugh Dancy), has its own difficulties, and Martha’s disgust at what she sees as their shallow, materialistic sham of normalcy suggests that she has held onto some of Patrick’s teachings even after fleeing his world. Some of her behavior — plunging into the lake without a bathing suit, curling up on Ted and Lucy’s bed after interrupting their love-making — indicates that the cult has stripped away her sense of propriety and her inhibitions.

The film does not necessarily see this as a bad thing, and not only because the camera relishes the sight of Ms. Olsen with no clothes on. The narrative structure, switching back and forth between Patrick’s utopia and Lucy and Ted’s middle-class dream, creates a sense of symmetry, or even equivalence, between the two places. In both of them displays of compassion and generosity mask selfish agendas, and solicitude turns into collusion. Ted, an arrogant architect with a British accent, is far less compelling than Patrick, a soulful monster but not necessarily a hypocrite. And the cult at least supplied her with friends.

Mr. Durkin conveys Martha’s dissociation by means of a number of compositional and formal strategies. He shoots Ms. Olsen in off-center close-ups, and frequently induces confusion for the viewer at the beginning of a scene, about where it is taking place. Are we back at Patrick’s farm, or at home with Ted and Lucy?

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After a while this technique starts to seem like a trick, and the ingenuity of the movie’s structure begins to feel evasive rather than probing. The drama is all in the jumps and juxtapositions, rather than in any sustained consideration of Martha’s experience.

She remains a blank space in the middle of a film that is an impressive piece of work without achieving quite the emotional impact it intends. We are witnessing not the disintegration of a personality, but rather the careful construction of a series of effects. Patrick periodically criticizes his disciples, including Martha, for failing to be open enough with him, and that is also a shortcoming of “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” which is a bit too coy, too clever and too diffident to believe in.